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Detexify

This seems pretty cool: this website allows you to draw a picture of the LaTeX symbol you would like, and then searches the popular “Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List” for them. It’s far from perfect, but still seems worth bookmarking.

Also, it gets smarter as people use it, so be sure to tell the website when it finds the right symbol, so it gets smarter for other people.

The website does seem to learn (like HAL in 2001).
I just taught it to pick \ltimes out of its very long list.
It was way off the first time, though I tried to keep the
lines reasonably straight. LaTeX has spawned an
impressively long list of symbols by now, harder to
organize linearly than Chinese characters.

By the way, wasn’t there a line in “Casablanca” like
“Type it again, Sam”?

But my misquote works so much better here. (The
misquote seems to originate with the Marx Brothers
in their 1946 “A Night in Casablanca”, but then became
the title of Woody Allen’s later play/movie “Play it Again,
Sam”. Blame it all on him.

The serious point David makes is that on most systems
text deleted is text lost unless you consciously back it up.
On the Unix system here, I seem to generate two files
for my magnum opus: riemann.tex and the previously
saved version riemann.tex~ (which might survive a casual
deletion of the main file). But backing up is always good,
even if my proof of the Riemann Hypothesis isn’t.

The xpdf suite of tools for PDF contains a command pdftotext which can convert a PDF to text. It’s not so great on mathematics, and doesn’t handle formatting, but will at least save you retyping everything.

(It’s also useful in scripts for searching through documents, by the way).

If this were a mathematical version of stackoverflow, I would vote up the “version control” posts and Ben’s “inkscape2tikz” post, though I’d add a couple of qualifiers:

I query the “almost as good as” in Scott’s post; one great thing about distributed version control is that it makes it easier to have remote backups.

And I’m not completely sure that the inscape2tikz addon is what Scott wants. That tries too hard to replicate the exact drawing whereas I imagine Scott would want something that straightens out the lines and aligns the nodes and stuff like that.

(As for Scott’s roommate, well, words fail me)

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